James Thomas Heflin

James Thomas "Cotton Tom" Heflin (9 April 1869-22 April 1951) was a member of the US House of Representatives (D-AL 5) from 19 May 1904 to 1 November 1920, succeeding Charles Winston Thompson and preceding William B. Bowling, and a US Senator from 3 November 1920 to 3 March 1931, succeeding B.B. Comer and preceding John H. Bankhead II.

Biography
James Thomas Heflin was born in Louina, Alabama in 1869, and he was admitted to the bar in 1893. He helped to draft the 1901 Constitution of Alabama, and he served as Secretary of State of Alabama from 1903 to 1904, before serving as a member of the US House of Representatives from 1904 to 1920 and of the US Senate from 1920 to 1931. He supported post-emancipation slavery of African-Americans, and he would brag about his shooting of a black man during a confrontation on a Washington DC streetcar as one of his major career accomplishments. During the 1920s, he expressed hostility to the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic influence on his party, voting for Republican Party candidate Herbert Hoover in 1928 due to Democratic nominee Al Smith's Catholicism; this led to a rift between Heflin and "Yellow Dog Democrats", who would rather vote for a "yellow dog" than a Republican. He was not renominated in 1930, and he died in 1951.